MS had a much larger market share than Apple does in any product category. They were something like 95% or more of the PC OS market. Apple has, in the US, around 50% of the smartphone market and around 15% of the PC market.
MS also did a lot to curtail competition that Apple hasn't even come close to. Like how they crippled BeOS by threatening OEMs with higher Windows licensing costs (as a low-margin business this would have pushed any OEM prices too high to remain competitive).
A long time ago Google used to have a program called "bureaucracy busters," where submissions were reviewed by the CFO to find internal barriers to getting things done.
It was a good system. It no longer really exists and has been replaced by endless reprioritization and detailed bean counting justifying every single small action to prove to layers of management that what you are doing is worthwhile as Google slowly rots into a decayed husk of its old self.
I was in my late-20s when the bubble burst. There was a palpable sense of "the sky is falling". A lot of not-so-technical people quit (or were let go from) tech jobs to become real estate agents.
One person that really helped me through all the doom-and-gloom was Phillip Kaplan, a.k.a. Pud. Seriously. He ran a site called "Fucked Company", which poked fun at the stupidity of big dotcom companies with questionable business models. The site was funny and all, but what really helped me was how Pud ran a successful web site that made money, by himself, with no Super Bowl ads or anything else. It reinforced to me that a successful business could be run on the web/internet, despite what all the doom-and-gloomers were saying. I knew the web wasn't dead thanks, in part, to Pud and "Fucked Company".
Pud's book, "F'd Companies: spectacular dot-com flameouts", was a good laugh. It's just a simplistic piss-take, but even all these years later, it shows up the sheer ridiculousness of what those dotcoms were trying to do and were able to (apparently easily) get millions of dollars of funding for.
I started my career in '95, too, and yeah, as difficult as it is to believe now, Microsoft's monopoly wasn't yet assured. The OS market was pretty much locked up (OS/2 Warp???), but as I recall, Wordperfect was the big obstacle in the office-suite space. It had a massive userbase, especially in markets that were not friendly to change (law offices).
IMHO, the big boost for Microsoft was when they adopted the Lotus 1-2-3 and Wordperfect file formats. Now there was a product that costs less (free, with a new PC), and was compatible with all the existing docs/data. Game over.
Os/2 warp was miles ahead of windows 95 technically. The main issue was that it was also a bit too ambitious in terms of system requirements which meant that on most systems it was slow as molasses really.
Add that to the Microsoft first mover advantage and it was doomed to fail.
I ran OS/2 v 3 on a machine with 8 megabytes (sic) of RAM quite smoothly. But I had to choose: either I enable TCP/IP networking and disable the Win16 emulator, or the other way around. If I enabled both, the machine started to swap to disk too much.
Win95 worked well on such a machine, and even worked tolerably on machines with 4 MB RAM, which were still around. It lacked the nice true multitasking, because it was basically running on a DOS extender, like most large DOS games. But you could run win32 programs, win16 programs, DOS programs, and have TCP/IP and thus access the Internet all at the same time. It was a killer combination. Also, it had a really thought-out GUI, a big upgrade compared to Win 3.1. (Far from the coolness of OS/2 WPS, but...)
Yeah that's the thing, OS/2 really was way better (at least when Warp came around because the earlier versions were really mediocre). It was really IBM's last try to revert the mistake they had made with Microsoft back in the early days of the IBM PC. They failed to see its potential.
The desktop really reminded me of HP/Apollo's VUE (which later got turned into CDE when Sun and IBM joined the project). Especially due to the large "dock".
In my memory (was young at the time), 95 coming out was such a huge event. Something about its emphasis on multimedia experience really changed the whole feel of the PC, at least for me. 3.1 was like this arcane puzzle, but 95 felt personable.
Don’t forget the Rolling Stones Start Me Up was the marketing song. We ‘leet hackers all joked that it was entirely appropriate for “Windoze’s” theme song to include the lyrics “You make a grown man cry.” Those were the days!
I drive a 30-year-old Nissan pickup truck for this exact reason. Not sure why, but I get a small sense of joy knowing that the corporate overlords aren't "watching" me drive. Of course they're "watching" me on my phone (as I drive the beater truck), but that's a different story.
That old truck is probably polluting 10-30× more than a modern one. While corporations have their flaws, they have spent time and money making engines more efficient and reducing harmful emissions.
In France, we have mandatory car checkup every few years where they test the pollution from the back of the car.
My old car, made in early 90 barely emitted more pollutant than regulation allow.
Ended up buying a Volkswagen Passat, very impressive it emitted a lot less. Then dieselgate happened... Now it's barely under what the regulation allow.
Keep your old polluting car, in the grand scheme of things it is better than buying a new one that end up polluting much more to build than what you would gain in everyday emission.
your theory assumes that everyone is lying about their emissions and then later assumes that your old car is not, in fact, lying about emissions. also that you can just keep an old car running indefinitely on a limited budget.
there wasn't much pressure from regulation to have low pollution emissions in car during the early 1990, beside the car i'm speaking about, a golf 2, has such a small diesel engine that it makes sense it would pollute very little compared to the much heavier and much more powerful passat (at least compared to the whooping 50 horse power the golf had !).
i can still remember avoiding road too steep lol.
Beside, when i am saying that keeping the older car is better for environment, i am not theorizing but speaking about things that have been studied.
> Specifically, researchers find keeping older fuel efficient cars on the road longer reduces CO2 emissions significantly more than speeding up the global transition to green technology.
I wish more people were aware of this. I'm often reminded of a conversation I overheard at my high school retail job:
$OLDGUY_CUSTOMER (to my coworker): "Wow, I just saw a big crash on [nearby arterial road]! The entire front of the car was smashed in!"
$COWORKER: "Oh no! Was the driver alright?"
$OLDGUY: "Yeah, he seemed fine. There wasn't an ambulance or anything." [beat] "Man, they don't make them like they used to. When I was young, cars didn't crumple like that - it was much safer!"
That old truck will pollute less in its lifetime than the amount of energy it takes to produce a modern automobile, let alone the cumulative energy spent to sustain a consumer base ready to sign a new lease every 36 months for the latest and greatest in aggregated conflict minerals + spyware on wheels, it just does it all over the poors someplace else instead of where you live.
my headphones just popped up an alert on my phone that turned out to be an ad for a nascar race. that got their app uninstalled. if they ever realize that they can start shoving ads directly into my ears that's when the headphones themselves get taken out back and smashed with a hammer.
YouTube. I think in most cars it’s gonna be a discrete component that can just be unplugged. The big question is what functionality you lose, and whether you can live with that tradeoff.
Anecdotally, my 2023 Kia's infotainment unit is one big plastic box that I was able to access by just prying up some plastic and undoing a handful of screws.
I was applying some dielectric grease to the USB port used for Android Auto (in order to prevent intermittent disconnects while driving) but I wouldn't be surprised if one of the many other cables plugged into it led to a cell antenna on the exterior.
There are also software options; I was able to disable the "telematics" in the same vehicle by inputting a (frankly schizophrenic) combo of rolling back the date, touching random invisible trigger zones in menus, and entering a leaked PIN to access the appropriate service menu on the infotainment unit.
Figuring all that out was unfortunately quite difficult, although I imagine you might be able to get "official" help if your local dealership is friendly and willing to bend the rules. I had to settle for a lot of keyword massaging on Google.
I loved my Sonos soundbar. It sounded amazing. But it required me to use their terrible app. That's why I got rid of it (the app was REALLY bad!) - luckily, before they started bricking customers' devices.
Yeah like these "cheap" HP printers, which have to be connected to the internet so that they can force you into a subscription, use their own inks only etc. They do not belong to you either.
I worked for a PBM in the late-90s. I wish I would've sold crack cocaine and guns to children. I would've felt better about myself. ... Hyperbole, indeed, but wow, that company, and PBM industry, was shady as fuck.
That whole situation was so strange to me. I was in my mid-20s at the time, trying to make sense of the "adult world". Then they tell me something is both illegal and legal at the same time, depending on how your label it - like Schrodinger's cat, but dumber.
And that's when I really started to feel dirty about working for the PBM. I knew the company was part of the machine, helping push drugs onto people, purely driven by profit, not actual need. Like, I dealt with drugs dealers a bunch in college (weed, ecstasy), and none of them ever tried to push drugs onto me. They just sold it, and that was it. But I really started to see how this whole machine operated, and I was part of it. :'(
I can't speak for all providers, but I can say that, in many cases they're getting squeezed by the insurance companies, too. My girlfriend is a provider of services for young people with disabilities. The insurance companies fully dictate how much she can charge (how much the insurance companies will pay) and even what specific services she can provide (what they'll specifically pay for). It's infuriating. Up until about 7 years ago, she was fully funded by the state through the California Department of Education, and it was simple. She met with a single person from the state monthly, they reviewed her billable hours, made some corrections here and there, and she got paid. Simple. When private insurance was introduced it became a nightmare. She had to hire a full-time employee just to manage billing with the insurance companies. One insurer won't even talk to providers at all. Nothing. Nada. She has to fax them. Yes, fax. And their fax machine only answers during business hours; it's powered-off outside of business hours. Why? Because fuck you, that's why. It's obvious that the insurance companies make it as difficult as possible for providers to get paid, which is not too different from patients. Weird...not.
> And their fax machine only answers during business hours; it's powered-off outside of business hours. Why?
In some cases, privacy laws require that fax machines be actively monitored so that sensitive personal information is not just left sitting around in the open for hours.
Yes, there could probably be alleviated with sort form of purely digital fax system, but for regular fax machines, this could be why they are only available during staffed hours.
It's almost the same when you deal with billing departments in hospitals. They give you the runaround, "lose" things repeatedly, ignore you. The whole US health system is abusive but there is so much money flowing around that it's worth it to many participants. I know doctors who complain about their workload but they would never consider moving from 600k salary to 400k in exchange for a straight 40 hour week.
What's amazing to me is how much things have changed since the Microsoft antitrust saga: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor....
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